The Ballad of Buster Scruggs and the many types of dark storytelling

Like much of Joel and Ethan Coen's repertoire, the anthology film "The Ballad of Buster Scruggs" is masterfully crafted but devoid of a soul. 

The Coens dabble in a lot of tragedy and their joy is in inverting the familiar notion that tragedy has to have a larger point. If the point of tragedy is to absorb a deeper truth about human nature, the Coens often delight in having you learn as little as possible.

Four of the vignettes of the film end in tragedy and each of them are dark in a way that could take away one's enjoyment of the episode as a whole. What I find most interesting is how this is based on differing views of what one views as tragedy.

The vignette "Meal Ticket" has been cited as the darkest. A scruffy entrepeneuer played by Liam Neeson peddles around a limbless orator (Harry Helping) as entertainment and reaps the monetary rewards. As the crowds dwindle, the limbless man is eventually discarded into a river and replaced by a chicken.

This one wasn't as dark because the entertainer didn't have much to live for in the first place. He had no free agency in a very literal sense but in a broader sense, he was treated as nothing more than property. In that sense, he was put out of his misery.

The titular and first vignette, "The Ballad of Buster Scruggs" , personally negatively resonated the most with me. Scruggs (Tim Blake Nelson) is a simpleton of a caricature who roams the West alternatively singing jaunty tunes and brutally murdering people. What was bothersome here is that Buster Scruggs is so casually removed from the pain he inflicted on others. It's true that much of his shooting was in self-defense but at least a couple of his kills (like the bartender in the first bar) were not necessary and one was pretty gratuitous (shooting off every finger). Other people might not mind this as much because violence on this level happens in film all the time. Personally, I'm the guy who watches a James Bond movie and thinks, "hmmm, did Bond absolutely need to kill that henchman? What does it say about us as an audience that we don't care?" But I'm not sure if that makes it any easier; it's just more common place.

The vignette "The Gal Who Got Rattled" was the second most tragic to me because Alice (Zoe Kazan) haracter was so close to surviving. What's more, Alice is the most tragic because she doesnt belong in a Western in the sense that the other tragic characters have more forgivable deaths because they signed up for the risk. Alice is in the mold of a Shakespearean tragedy with maximum irony being wringed out: If fate had gone a hundred different ways, she would have still been alive.

Lastly, there's  "Near Agadones." A bank robber (James Franco) is caught and miraculously saved from hanging by a man who has been illegally rustling cattle. He ends up heing put on the gallows twice in one day and the second time he's not so lucky. To keep things from getting completely bleak, the outlaw dies with a smile because he spotted a pretty girl moments before his death and took a moment to relish in her beauty. But that's just a tad of sweet that's up against A LOT of bitter.

The character's fate was dark in a poignant and somewhat disturbing sense. Athough he did sign up for the risk of a torturous ending when he elected to rob a bank, there's the irony of getting hanged for the wrong crime. Still, what's disturbing about his story is that in the Old West (as portrayed here) the methods of execution are harsher than any other code we live by or know of (theft is not punishable by murder anywhere I know of) and this reality is laid bare in extreme detail. Watching Franco's character hang by a thread is somewhat excruciating.